George Azzari joined the Department of Earth System Science as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in February 2015 and became a Research Associate in November 2016. He's affiliated with the Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) and the Stanford Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
George works with David Lobell on designing, implementing, and applying new satellite-based monitoring techniques to study several aspects of food security. His current focuses include estimates of crop yields, crop classification, and detection of management practices in Africa, Asia, and the United States. His research uses a variety of satellite sensors from the private and public sector -including Landsat (NASA/USGS), Sentinel 1 and 2 (ESA), MODIS (NASA), RapidEye (Planet), Planet Scope (Planet), and Skysat (Terrabella)- combined with crop modeling and machine learning techniques.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, where he worked with Mike Goulden on monitoring post-fire succession of southern California ecosystems from remote sensing data. He examined the impact of topographic illumination effects on long time series of optical satellite data.